Passion Pit Puts Its Mind over Manners

Michael Angelakos' speaking voice is nothing like you'd expect. "If
I sound really weird," he says by phone from his Cambridge home, "it's
because I have really bad allergies right now." But that's not it. No,
it's more the fact that he doesn't sound like a woman, which is the way
he comes off when he sings with his fast-rising electro-pop outfit,
Passion Pit. "Oh, that?" he says. "That's like a character I do with
this project. I don't usually sing that way."

In fact, he explains, he never sang like that at all until a couple
of years ago, when he made the now-famous Chunk of Change EP, a
kind of valentine for his girlfriend at the time. He used his happy,
high-pitched falsetto all through the six-track laptop recording.
Released by Frenchkiss Records in September 2008, the EP included the
contagious single "Sleepyhead," a club-ready pop joint with a
pitched-up vocal sample from the Irish harpist Mary O'Hara. The blogs
went nuts for it, Passion Pit became the new Vampire Weekend, and
Angelakos' life changed forever.

A lot of musicians would spend months preparing material for a
record born of such hype. Not him. The 21-year-old showed up at
Gigantic Studios on the Lower East Side in November with not one note
written for Passion Pit's debut full-length,
Manners—unless you count "Sleepyhead," which made the cut.
Angelakos made up every other song on the spot with producer Chris Zane
at the console.

"I'd come in and pull up a blank screen on the computer," Zane
recalls. "Then I'd turn to Michael and say, 'So, what kind of song do
you want to make today?'" The resulting tracks vary from '80s-style
soft-rock ("Eyes as Candles") to Arcade Fire-esque anthems ("Moth's
Wings") to straight-up dance-floor electronica ("Little Secrets"). A
giant step up from the EP's homemade feel, Manners seamlessly
meshes surreal, deeply psychological lyrics with epic melodies and
elaborate sound design.

Zane admits that, at first, he had serious doubts that this
off-the-cuff method could produce such a well-written album, especially
for such a young band. "I was like, 'This is going to last about two
days with this kid,'" says Zane, who, at 31, became a kind of
big-brother figure to the frontman and his bandmates, most of whom only
breezed in occasionally to lay down instrumentals. "But just the time
when I thought he was bullshitting, I'd realize he was so on it. He's
simultaneously the most irresponsible and mature 21-year-old I've ever
met. "

Zane would eventually learn much more about Angelakos' personality
than he ever wanted to know. The two of them, along with engineer Alex
Aldi and drummer Nate Donmoyer, quickly fell into an intense alternate
dimension of creativity. Disregarding their personal lives, they worked
14-hour days for almost three months from November to January in hopes
of making a record that would justify the buzz. "The stakes were really
high," Angelakos says. "The intensity of the project had become
something way different than it was in the beginning, something we
never thought we'd be dealing with."

For one thing, the budding songwriter decided to use the sessions as
an opportunity to examine his personal life. While Chunk of
Change was aimed at an external romantic subject, Manners is
almost entirely self-reflective. "I wanted to write about something
that I knew really well," he says. "So the whole album talks about
paranoia and guilt." He won't get too specific about his sources of
turmoil, but his cryptic lyrics harbor strong hints of existential
torment. On "To Kingdom Come," he wails, "Me, I cried out 'God!'/You
dared me in the dark/I felt a hush fall quietly from my spark/So now I
hide in piles of princely orange peels." The album's title alone
symbolizes the struggle to keep a façade of normality on a
psyche racked with confusion.

"For me, it represents the ability to kind of live through, to be
polite and kind and put on a show for everybody even though you're
pained," he says. "I got to a point where most of the time, I was
walking around thinking the exact opposite of what I was doing."

Passion Pit's overall aesthetic holds major clues about this
existential dichotomy. In the video for the single "The Reeling,"
released last month, his lip-synching face is obscured by a
collage-like effect, while the star of the clip, a gorgeous young
woman, dances down a dark street joyfully. On much of the album,
Angelakos' manic-depressive poetry is veiled by the band's jubilant
party-pop sound: synthesizers, dance beats, helium voices. The band
even employed a choir of fifth-graders to sing on the choruses of a few
songs, including the invigorating track "Little Secrets," which, though
Angelakos won't confirm it explicitly, hints at possible drug use. (The
explosive chorus goes: "Let this be our little secret/No one needs to
know we're feeling/Higher and higher and higher.")

But while these sessions with Zane were producing brilliant pop
music, things outside the control room weren't necessarily going
smoothly. As much as the group tried to put blinders on and focus on
the album, there were plenty of real-life hitches: Zane contracted
bronchitis, the weather was bad, the studio's ventilation system broke
down. Meanwhile, Angelakos and Donmoyer were sharing a bed in a spare
room in a stranger's Lower East Side flat and blowing off steam as much
as possible in their spare time. "Shit was just insane," Donmoyer says.
"I said some things I wouldn't repeat, but Michael and I are very
similar, like twins, so it worked out."

One low point occurred when the group took a two-day break for
Thanksgiving and the band was due to fly back to Boston. When Angelakos
reached LaGuardia Airport, he called Zane, frantic. He was about to be
arrested because he didn't have enough money to pay his cab fare. "I
had to pay $45 to get there, $45 to get back, plus Michael's $45," Zane
recalls. "I want to say it's typical, because making records is always
intense, but this was pretty extreme." One night, Zane says, he locked
all the band members' cell phones and laptops in another room and had
it out with them. "I remember saying, 'I'm about to kill you
motherfuckers,'" he says. "They would go out and get wasted and come in
to the studio hung over, stuff like that. But I eventually realized,
they're 21—that's what they do. It's going to be fine."

And, of course, it was. Despite the trials of getting it done, no
one involved with making Manners has a single regret, least of
all Angelakos, who, by all accounts, has changed dramatically since the
sessions started.

"I'm not the most emotionally mature person I know, but that's what
really fuels a lot of this record," he says. "This past year saw me in
very difficult situations, and I dealt with them accordingly, but I'm
self-aware enough to know my shortcomings."